Contributed Guest Additions, with possibility of Net Install

Discussion of how to provide WineD3D for VirtualBox (see ticket 2940), suggested that there may be a need for the concept of 'contribued guest additions', which aren't necessarily tied to the build cycle of VirtualBox.

The concept is similar in many ways to Firefox and the extensions available for it. Basically you would have a library of optional guest additions, that can be downloaded and installed into VirtualBox. So as not to tie them to the build cycle of VirtualBox, the guest addition installer would check online to see whether there are any new optional additions and whether there are any updates. There could even be a start-up task that would periodically check to see if anything has changed, similar to Firefox.

Change History

The exact implementation of this needs to be worked out, but it sounds like a good idea to me. It would be especially beneficial for WineD3D which seems to get frequent builds that bring much desired improvements.

When I originally opened the ticket it was originally to provide an 'extensions manager', mainly to support out of cycle stuff like the WineD3D addition. At the same time as I read some of the comments it certainly becomes clear that this gains more value if there is an API for adding non-core functionality.

I am okay with the ticket's nature changed if you feel there possibility for a larger scope.